A week later my dismay had largely vanished, again thanks to the skeptical I. D. L. Michael, sometimes called “Ideal M” because of his initials, who took the trouble to phone me from Exeter College, full of excitement, in the sole and benevolent aim of filling me in on the conversation about my book he had just finally had with Toby Rylands in the Senior Common Room of the Taylorian, with its pay-as-you-go electric coffee pot. The cause of Rylands’ ire was indeed as Ian Michael had imagined; he certainly did not remember that he had never actually told me anything concrete about his recruitment by the secret services or his special missions in exotic places or other escapades, he hadn’t even given me a proper account of the witty prince he had gone on binges with. The volume, flung from his colonial rattan chair, had lain on the scraggly lawn for nine or ten nights and days, after which, still somewhat intrigued by what he had read before the wrathful interruption—and having uneasily caught sight, from his window, of the tempting book, semi-sheltered by a climbing vine next to which it had fallen—he’d plucked it from the foliage, brushed it off, smoothed down its pages, started over from the beginning and devoured it in a few hours. I held my breath. “He liked it,” Ian told me after an inopportune pause whose only conceivable purpose was to prolong my agitation: “He thinks it’s your best novel yet. He still isn’t amused by your mentioning the espionage, especially not the bit about Haiti, but he says that in the end he has nothing to complain of, since, in his opinion, he inspired the most attractive character in the book, the most profound and memorable, the strongest, the one who says the most intelligent things. In fact, he’s now taken the character for his own; it wouldn’t surprise me if he soon started imitating him a little. He even repeated to me, as an original line of his own, a sentence your character says.” I let out my breath, gladdened and relieved, among other and more important reasons because I saw myself freed from the specter of being accused of the wide variety of depravities I had been dreading for a week by then, balanism, strangury, satyriasis, nequicia, mictionism, pyromania, enfiteusis, positivism, erotesis, felo-de-se, or perhaps even lardy-dardiness, though I don’t know if any of those words, which have cropped up here and there in my translations, correspond to vices (I think not) and I’m not about to go and look them all up right now, but their obscene or sinister sonority alone makes them all, without exception, deserve to be tremendous perversions—irreversible degenerations. It would have pained me to be accused of enfiteusis.
I couldn’t help feeling some curiosity, which I didn’t consider vulgar this time; “Oh really? What sentence was it?” I asked my ex-boss. “We were talking about my cobaltic eczema or some ailment of his when he suddenly murmured pensively ‘To whom does the sick man’s will belong? To the sick man or to the disease?’ Well, something like that, I don’t know if he cited it verbatim. Did he cite it verbatim?” “I don’t know, I don’t remember; I don’t know every word of my book verbatim,” I answered, echoing his British Latin-ism, and then inquiring farther: “And what’s the problem with Haiti?” “Oh, I don’t know, you’re the one who knows, you mentioned it in the novel.”
I swear I knew absolutely nothing about any role played by Haiti in Toby Rylands’ dispersed and shrouded past. I could just as easily have said Honduras or Belize, Antigua or Montserrat or Barbuda, yet what I wrote was Haiti where, it now turned out, he had experienced some vicissitudes or left some trace of his escapades; perhaps the boisterous prince was from that island. I refrained from mentioning to Ian—so that he wouldn’t tell Toby about it, there’s a certain verbal incontinence in Oxford for which the city’s inhabitants should not be held too much to blame, it’s in the air there, a tendency to instantly release whatever information is acquired, everyone is at risk but everyone also gains—that some of the fictional Toby Rylands’ thoughts were more in the spirit of one of the most kindly and astute old men I’ve ever known, the poet Vicente Aleixandre, who often spoke laughingly and with derision of his ailments, calling them “mis lacras,” “my scourges,” to mollify them; and the other reflections were invented. I preferred that Toby take all of them for his own as time went on, if he wanted to and the fog of memory favored it; they’re his already if he wants them, no longer mine or my poet friend’s, they are much more his now, that’s how I see it anyway; Toby was also astute, and kindly in his way, though more caustic and punitive, and not as warm. “He liked the way you describe his laugh,” Ian added, “so I think that despite earlier indicators we’ve won him over to the cause.” I was silent, listening to my ex-boss absently hum a melody that seemed to me to be a well-known ballad that speaks or tells the story of the Molly Maguires, the Irish secret society whose members disguised themselves as women to strike their blows and bring terror to the police and the judiciary around 1843, emerging again later, thousands of miles away, among the Irish who immigrated to Pennsylvania, I know all of this, believe it or not, primarily because there was a movie about them with the Scotsman Sean Connery. Ian Michael is Welsh, but the character in the novel who could most closely be compared to him was Irish, Aidan Kavanagh. “The cause,” I thought, and immediately there came to mind the famous and mysterious passage, this time indeed verbatim: “It is the cause, it is the cause my soul,—/ Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—/ It is the cause.—Yet I’ll not shed her blood; / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow.…” Othello says this to himself just before killing Desdemona who is sleeping her innocent sleep but will awake to learn of her own death; and four centuries after he spoke those words for the first time we still don’t entirely know what cause it is that should not be named to the stars, or what Othello meant by the enigmatic and repeated words, “It is the cause, it is the cause”; he didn’t even say “She is the cause.” I was still thinking about the unknown woman in Oxford, now believed to be an adulteress, and I was the cause, both her Cassio and her Iago, the false lover and the man who incited suspicion, not with my whisperings but with my writings, though without wanting to or foreseeing it. “I hope it’s not an Othello she’s with,” I thought; “it almost certainly is not, there aren’t many left these days, at least not in England. Yet there are still Iagos everywhere.” And I’m not sure whether I didn’t think the second of these three things only in order to calm my fears. “… And smooth as monumental alabaster. / Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men. / Put out the light, and then put out the light …,” Othello goes on, and I went on remembering. “Hey, how’s the atomic carpet?” I asked Ian then, breaking in on his absentminded ditty and my thoughts and citations. “Is it still giving off radioactivity, or is it just shooting up X-rays to unmask you?”
Yes, it was Ian David Lewis Michael who spoke of “the cause,” in the least probable—but not impossible—sense in which Othello may have been using the word. And that was how my former, humorously-inclined boss lived the life of All Souls, as a small cause of his own, which was rather touching to me and for which I will always be grateful to him (he was more concerned about the book than its own boorish and disbelieving publisher who was making a profit from it: quite a contrast). Not only did he become an ardent defender of the novel, but he followed each of the unexpected phases of its still unfinished career with enthusiasm and delight, gathering opinions and reactions wherever he could, he and Eric Southworth; I never thought that in a city like Oxford, about which so much literature, good and bad, has been written for centuries, my own book could create the slightest stir; on the contrary, I expected indifference, even if it were feigned. Perhaps I wasn’t taking sufficient account of the fact that it’s a very cloistered place, feeding entirely on itself, at once learned, lordly, and provincial, like Venice, the other city I lived in during those years, to which I flew in terror whenever I could, in a state of febrile expectation and permanent anxiety, it’s where perhaps the best and worst things in my life have happened to me—leaving aside, among the worst, the deaths of those I loved who died in other places. It isn’t necessary to be as specific as I’ve just been, but s
ometimes one has to guard against jokes, in an area where one doesn’t allow them, and one always knows where that is. Sometimes one must take precautions, so as not to to be forced, later, to kill with words.
Indifference was indeed feigned by some, as I was to learn, but the dissemblers, such as Alec Dewar, should have been more careful and kept more fully in mind that in Oxford everything and everyone is found out and tattled on. Not only did Ian see Dewar leafing through the copy that the well-built student clad in a shirt imprudently light for that time of year had brought him, but other people also came upon him, carefully and furtively reading when he thought he was alone in the Senior Common Room or invisible in a corner of the library. Nevertheless, around his colleagues in the department he continued to insist on playing the man without a clue (“Oh really? A novel by Javier, set in Oxford? Oh yes, I vaguely recall someone telling me something about it. No, I haven’t read it, I’m spending all my time on the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega these days”), probably to avoid having to express an opinion, or in order to let everyone see that no contemporary work, whatever it might be, could possibly interest him. A colleague at his college—whose knowledge was absolutely first-hand—informed me that he did indeed boast to whoever happened to sit next to him in the refectory or at the high tables of having become a novelistic character in Europe—what he said was not “in a novel,” but “novelistic,” my mole emphasized. Deliberately severe and involuntarily shy, the good Alec Dewar was at last in possession of a topic that was original and his alone: now he was the one to announce the news, answer the questions that courtesy obliged, enlighten his interlocutors and set the course of the conversation, rather than waiting for his dinner companions to take an interest in him and throw a word or two in his direction, which, fearful of his apparently severe and even blustering character, they did not always do. “If you must know, my friend,” he said with undisguised self-importance to my informant from Trinity or Christ Church or Corpus Christi, “I have been the subject and central motif of a roman à clef, which, as you know, is a French expression meaning ‘novel with a key,’ one of those books in which the astonished reader never stops wondering whether, or to what incredible degree, it can all be true—all that the author writes about characters who aren’t really characters, you understand, but recognizable or somewhat recognizable representations of real persons: recognizable to those who know them, it must be said. There is a very good Spanish word for this, of course you won’t know it and it isn’t easy to translate or explain, like all the best terms. A very interesting word: tra-sun-to,” he concluded after taking a breath, bending forward and even changing expression to pronounce it, solemnly spacing out the syllables and speaking in a much higher—evidently even strident—tone of voice that almost caused a cataclysm at the table and of course did cause half a dozen startled jumps (spoons let fly through the air) and another half dozen bouts of choking. My mole was a chemist, and at Oxford there is a not entirely unfounded tendency to believe that every professor or don is an eminent luminary in his own field but lives in the most absolute ignorance of anything beyond it, lacking even the most elementary notions that are well within the grasp of any child. The chemist was fully aware of the meaning of roman à clef, and rather irritated at having it explained to him, but not of trasunto, and I had to improvise the definition Dewar was at great pains to keep from providing. It is my suspicion that he had probably just rediscovered this deeply interesting word in the work of the Inca Garcilaso or in the dictionary. “Yes? And what does this foreign novel have to say about you, Doctor Dewar? Something we mustn’t know? Some compromising piece of information? Some roguery?” my chemist asked him. And Dewar answered complacently, or rather with triumphal delectation—the skin of his pate stretched tighter than usual, his glasses slipping down, “The most fantastic things, I assure you, the most fantastic things. And the fanny thing is that some of them are true, no one would ever think it. Well, well, so it goes in this day and age.” It’s a pity he didn’t say exactly which things he would admit to the truth of, because I would have liked, as with Rylands, to know what I had hit on without wanting or trying to. But it is possible—or at least to be hoped, and this alone would justify my book—that the real replica or trasunto of the fictional Butcher or Hammer subsequently awoke greater interest among his colleagues and dinner companions, or, better still, greater appreciation, at least until the appearance of the novel in French, the first language into which it was translated, and which all curious dons know, even chemists.
Neither Fred Hodcroft nor John Rutherford had much to say about All Souls, and perhaps in their cases the indifference was authentic; anyway, no one was ever tempted to recognize either of them in any of the characters or to see them replicated on any page, which may serve to reinforce the preceding conjecture. I trust that one of Toby Rylands’ predictions was, nevertheless, not entirely correct and that neither Hodcroft nor Rutherford, for whom I have great respect and greater liking, were ever bothered or offended because, in their regard, the mistake was not made which was made with regard to Ian, Toby, Eric, Philip Lloyd-Bostock, Alec Dewar, Leigh-Peele, the boozing Lord Rymer, Tom the porter, and even the belle inconnue adulteress, or perhaps connue, or perhaps not even belle, and certainly not an adulteress, or, then again, who knows. And with regard not only to these people, who are all related to the University, but also to certain other Oxonians who had last set foot in a classroom in their extreme youth, decades ago, and who certainly had only been there as impatient students. But I’ll speak of them later. I don’t imagine that either Fred or John considers himself harmed or deprived of a literary immortality that seems a bit ephemeral and perhaps already sepulchral.
So at least I wasn’t punished with the indifference I had expected (there was very little of that), and the novel gave rise, I believe, to more joking and diversion than anger or strife in those who were able to read it immediately in Spanish, and to passive curiosity in those who had to wait for it to be translated into their language or some other language they knew; among those who had to wait was Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, the celebrated essayist and current warden of St. Antony’s College, who is of German origin and to whom I was able to send, some time later, and at the request of his secretary (I’m not acquainted with him personally but did so with pleasure, I was attached to St. Antony’s under another ruling), a copy in his native tongue, which also preceded the English version and came out just when he took the trouble to request it, more for his domestic than his literary satisfaction, I believe. Perhaps only to flatter me, both Eric and Ian sent word that certain stirrings of envy and even threats of reprisal arose from the members of other faculties and the other departments of our own Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages or Institutio Tayloriana, who did not have a similar foreign novel to presumably portray or reflect them, however problematically, about which they could crow to their tablemates at the interminable and competitive high tables or dinners that take place on a raised platform (apparently the Slavic high tables were the most torturous, and the French ones the most tedious). If this were true, I imagine their envy arose not so much from the existence of the book itself as from the muffled but hearty laughter they spotted my former colleagues giving in to each time the book furnished them with some additional piece of news or gleeful rumor.
There was also the occasional megalomaniac professor who staked his claim to a place in those pages, individuals who were unknown to me or with whom I had never exchanged a word, and yet who asserted—swore—that they had served nevertheless as the unmistakable model for this or that character, however incidental or vague. Once open season on identifications was declared, a number were made that, like the identification of the fictional lover Clare Bayes with Ian Michael’s mysterious current neighbor, were entirely groundless; it was suspected, for example, that behind the tippling warden named Lord Rymer in the novel was hidden poor Raymond Carr, the illustrious and now emeritus professor, because he had been warden of St Antony’s in my t
ime and had concerned himself extensively with Spain in his prize-winning writings, and because of the unintentional equivalence between the consonants of the character’s surname and those of the historian’s Christian name (“Christian” is a figure of speech): Rymer, Raymond, completely absurd (there are so many customs officials and glib, twisted inspectors), particularly because there was indeed a slight source of inspiration for Lord Rymer, a genuine lord, ruddy, salacious, heavyset and with a real weakness for wine (not that Carr doesn’t enjoy a glass now and then, but not enough for any confusion: Carr is thin, and whenever I saw the lord he was staggering; they tell me he’s dead now). It was also believed—well, this was Ian again, who alerted the others with his inquiries and reconstructions—that the antiquarian book dealers who appear in All Souls as Mr. and Mrs. Alabaster had to correspond to the owners of the Turl Street bookshop Titles, whose name was Stone, in which case I would have ennobled them by transforming them from the vulgar Stone of reality to the monumental Alabaster of fiction (“Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth …”).
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